Comment by jasonellis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonellis | Hacker News Reader

Here is my Cliff's Notes version of the article's list:

5 Ways to Increase Your Cognitive Potential:

1) Seek Novelty. Openness to new activities correlates with IQ, because those individuals are constantly seeking new information, new activities to engage in, new things to learn, and new experiences.

2) Challenge Yourself. Brain games like Sudoku don't work to increase cognitive potential if you keep playing them. You play them, learn how the game works, then move onto a new challenge.

3) Think Creatively. This doesn't mean "thinking with the right side of your brain." It means using both halves of your brain to make remote associations between ideas and switching back and forth between conventional and unconventional thinking (cognitive flexibility) to generate original ideas appropriate to the activity you are doing. Like thinking both inside and outside the box when trying to solve a problem.

4) Do Things the Hard Way. GPS as an example. You may use GPS because you have a poor sense of direction. Using GPS will make it worse because you aren't giving your brain a chance to learn and build its ability to navigate. Same thing with auto-correct/spell check. You can't spell anymore because you rely on software to fix your mistakes.

5) Network. Whether on social media or in person, this gives you exposure to different ideas and environments that you otherwise wouldn't be exposed to. It allows you opportunities to practice the previous 4 objectives. Knowing more people gives you the chance to tap into more collective knowledge and experience.

Remind me how the correlation between openness to experience and IQ test scores suggests that seeking novelty might possibly increase your cognitive potential. I think I missed that part. With the same kind of "reasoning" I might have to write an article claiming that you should take lots of psychoactive drugs and have more sex to increase your cognitive potential, because there are positive correlations between these things and IQ scores. Also, if you want to get smarter, listen to the bands on the right of this chart! http://musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr/ ...why? Because correlations, of course! Much scientificful.

From the article 'Excellent learning condition = Novel Activity—>triggers dopamine—>creates a higher motivational state—>which fuels engagement and primes neurons—>neurogenesis can take place + increase in synaptic plasticity (increase in new neural connections, or learning).'

Not sure if it's scientifically correct, though.

My rather unscientific observation is that 'seeking novelty' enables you to think about things in different ways, to consider new approaches. I think 'expanding one's consciousness' could be aptly said in this regard.

Playing a sport, on a team involves so many dynamics that just don't exist when thinking in a classical intellectual sense whilst writing code, for example.

Living in a country for an extended period wherein the prevailing language and culture is not your own ... this can be really quite mind altering.

I think that the above correlation, pulled from the article maybe doesn't quite capture it. They basically state basically that 'novelty keeps you interested and motivated', I suspect there might be more than that.

Though obviously it's hard to discern since we don't really have a true model for brain functions and cognition.

Certainly it's a little misguided to suggest that an OCEAN correlate implies you can train intelligence; OCEAN is relatively stable across your life (that's what makes it a good personality metric). That said, I know at least one person who scored low on O taking an OCEAN battery but is in fact very diligent about seeking out novelty, so I think the O-factor depends more on how enthusiastic you look at the world at large versus deciding you want to be a polymath and working very hard at accomplishing that goal.

On the other hand, being able to have lots of sexual partners implies being able to convince lots of people you're worth having sex with (this is one of the two main goals which developed human intelligence in the first place, the other being killing people who were doing the first too effectively), and taking a lot of psychoactive drugs I think also implies a sort of mental fortitude (it's very difficult to habitually take strong psychedelics without having a solid grasp on reality and how to adjust your actions to account for the change in perspective, the people who can't do this but enjoy psychedelics anyway aren't who anyone is thinking of when they say intelligent people use psychedelics).

I listen to mostly metal, so you can trust what I say [https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2007/mar/21/whym...]

I already do all these things and can report that none of them are compatible with most corporate jobs. Creative critical thinking and novelty seeking especially disturb management.

who said any of this has anything to do with a corporate job? do it in the morning, the weekend; then use the benefits of increased cognitive potential at work?

The phrase "maximize potential" reeks of corporate performance, not personal growth. At least to me it does.

But... if you maximize your cognitive potential it'll make you clever enough to realize you should change jobs, n'est-ce pas?

Perhaps because thats the contexts in which you hear it most often.

Perhaps maximized cognitive potential isn't compatible with most corporate jobs.

Depends on where you work. I work for a 24,000-person enterprise, and I definitely have the freedom to do this. However, this is in large part due to my direct management—they encourage and enable me to do this, despite disfunction in some other parts of the org.

"Creative critical thinking and novelty seeking especially disturb management."

Not always.

If you can use your social intelligence to get your bosses peers to respect him more, I can assure you he/she will approve of that.

A large corporate body is a political entity, the product is only 30% of it. Call on your EI Jedi Powers. Sadly, most of them are kind of from the dark, or maybe 'grey' side, but hey.

But yes, large corporations usually have some kind of leverage or de-facto monopoly, and any significant change can risk the goose that lays the golden egg. So, they can be systematically averse to change, for good reason.

Disruptors value change because from a position of little power in a static system, it's the only way to gain power. But at some point, disruption becomes more of a risk than an opportunity.

Large consumer and retail banks are probably the best example of this.

Joining a Board Game Group or getting together with your own friends (and not just playing the same few games over and over) checks off many of these boxes and is a lot of fun!

Sounds too hard. Isn't there just a pill?

There's a whole bunch of pills and they're called Nootropics. Transhumanism anyone?

I think these are a bit like steroids though. They don't work on their own; you still have to train.

See this graph from [1] http://myzone-strengtheory.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads...

> Yes, you’re reading that chart correctly. The group that took a placebo and worked out only gained slightly more strength than the group that took testosterone and sat on the couch for 10 weeks. The group that took testosterone without exercise gained just as much, if not more, muscle mass than the people taking a placebo and actually working out.

[1]: http://strengtheory.com/the-science-of-steroids/

So, I like to learn new programming stuff, but most of that is mostly in front of a Pluralsight course, following along in Visual Studio or a text editor.

Any suggestions on how to make this novel or creative? I think I can find ways to activate the other 3

Write your own programs to solve your own problems! They can either be real problems, or just stuff you're interested in. Over the last few years I've written a program to help me cheat at Scrabble (great for creatively thinking around a problem, especially trying to optimize it), and wrote a very basic 2D game engine, just to see how it was done. Sometimes my SO complains about something and I write a little app to solve that problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com